Sam Harlan (Book 3): Damned Cold (6 page)

I took the opportunity to remove my coat and shoulder holster, placing them on the carpet in front of the couch. “I’ll take the floor.”

“The Christian thing to do,” Callie said with a smile, “would be to offer you the bed while I slept on the floor, but I’m going to let you make the sacrifice.”

She grabbed some clothes from the duffel bag and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind her, and returned soon after with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and dressed in oversized sweatpants and a heavy flannel shirt.

I scrounged around inside the duffel bag until I found my own sweatpants and shirt, and took my ditty bag to the bathroom to brush my teeth and change.

When I returned, Callie was already in bed. She looked young. Vulnerable. Her red hair practically blazed against the white pillow and her creamy white skin caused a sudden surge of something deep in me, something
more
than affection.

Is that … desire?

I pushed it deep inside. Callie was a woman religious. I couldn’t allow such thoughts to enter my head. After what Lewinheim said in Peoria, I couldn’t
ever
allow those thoughts to take root.

Callie caught me staring. “What?”

“You look like Katie,” I said.

I stepped past the bed and noticed she had placed a pillow on the floor, along with a spare blanket from the closet. I dumped my boots and jeans and heavy denim shirt on the floor between the couch and the bed and stretched out on the carpet, grabbing the cold, lumpy pillow and working it between my hands.

Callie rolled to her side and watched as I tried to get comfortable.

I caught her staring and asked, “What?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“We’ll know more tomorrow.”

She shook her head. “I meant, do you want to talk about Katie?”

Did I want to talk about Katie?

We’d mentioned her only briefly since moving to Iowa. Perhaps it was time to give it a shot. “After what happened,” I started, then my voice caught in my throat. “After everything, I needed time to get it right in my head.”

Callie finally asked, “And now?”

“When I saw my wife dead on the kitchen floor, I felt so … powerless. Things like that aren’t supposed to happen. Not in the real world. I was scared. Then when Silas took Lilly, I couldn’t think of anything except getting her back.”

“Your entire worldview was shattered,” Callie said.

“That’s—that’s one way to describe it. Then Stacie almost killed me. I was confused. Then we saved Katie from Timm, and…”

“Sam—”

“It wasn’t love, Callie. Not like I felt for my wife. It wasn’t lust, either. I’m reasonably sure I know the difference. It was kinship. We were going through the same thing. I wanted to save Lilly, and she wanted to save you.”

I’d been infected by a vampire, my wife Stacie, and Callie had promised to help me if I saved Katie from the vampire Larz Timm. Jack and I killed Timm and rescued Katie, but when Callie performed the cleansing ceremony, the vampire essence infecting me latched onto Callie’s soul and threatened to kill her.

Callie was at death’s door, her body in a coma. Katie joined me in trying to save my daughter, but also because killing Silas would free her sister.

If only Katie had lived.

In the dark nights since moving to Iowa, I had spent many hours drinking and thinking about what
could
have been and what
should
have been.

“She
should
have left me,” Callie said, her voice rough with emotion. “She should have left me for
dead
.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I tried to explain. “She was willing to do anything to save you. If Pearl hadn’t … if I had … I
tried
to save her. I wasn’t strong enough.”

“If only I had been with her, I might have—”

“
You’d
be dead,” I said. “She tried, Callie. She called upon her faith, but it wasn’t enough.”

“My faith was
always
stronger than hers,” Callie said, wiping at the tears that ran down her cheeks. “She never gave herself to God. Not like I did. That’s why you and her…”

“You think Katie’s lack of faith got her killed?” I asked. “Wait, you think something happened between us?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“We were desperate people in a terrible situation,” I said. “I was in shock, mourning for my wife, and she was … Timm
abused
her.
Fed
from her. When we saved her from Timm, of course she was bound to feel something for me.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Callie insisted. “If Katie had truly given herself to God, she couldn’t have …
been
… with you.”

“
Nothing
happened between us. We held each other and comforted each other.” Her eyes widened and I felt a brief stab of anger. “My God, Callie. All this time you thought we’d slept together?”

Callie started to speak, stopped herself, then snapped out, “It was none of my business.”

Then why do you sound like a jealous lover?

I paused before I could say anything I might regret, only continuing when I’d taken a few deep breaths. “Nothing happened. Nothing intimate, at least. I swear it.” I rolled over on the carpet, stuffing the pillow under my head. “Any physical attraction I
might
have felt for Katie was … it was just from all the craziness going on. The problem is…”

“What?” Callie asked.

“You look like her. Sometimes I see you out of the corner of my eye, and I can almost imagine you
are
Katie.”

There was a long silence before Callie spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “You’re attracted to me?”

I sighed. “I’m a man, Callie, and you are a beautiful woman. Of course, I feel urges. Lately, those urges have been…”

“This is what Father Lewinheim spoke of.”

“The hunger scares me. You’ve seen how bad it gets. Lewinheim says I’m going to feel other emotions. I’m not saying I was a saint before I married, but I didn’t chase every pretty woman within sight. The idea of losing control scares the hell out of me.”

“Language,” Callie said, but without her normal amount of reproach. “You can control yourself. You’re a good man, Sam Harlan.”

“Maybe,” I said, more to myself than to her. “There’s something else. I’m angry. All the time. There’s a fire in the pit of my gut. Sometimes I just want to smash the hell out of everything, like everything’s gone red around the edges and I’m gonna lose control.”

“But you haven’t.”

“Not yet.” I wanted to tell her that even thinking about it started the burning again in my belly.

There was an uncomfortable silence that stretched on until I heard a rustling and then the sound of a paper bag plopping down on the carpet next to me.

“Speaking of the hunger, I thought you might need this.”

I opened the bag and withdrew a piece of beef jerky, salivating so much that spit drooled down the corner of my mouth. I tore into the jerky, ripping shreds off with my teeth and wolfing it down. It was greasy, and smoky, and salty, and my body shuddered at the flavor. I swallowed and tore more off until the piece was gone, then I grabbed another. The hunger finally began to subside, and with it, the anger. “Thanks, Callie.”

“Things have changed,” Callie said. “No matter what trials and tribulations we encounter, I firmly believe we are doing the Lord’s work.”

“The Lord’s work? You still believe that?”

“I do,” she said firmly. “But, Sam? No one ever said it would be easy.”

I was still uncomfortable with the idea that a loving God would allow vampires to exist. No amount of ‘the Lord works in mysterious ways’ made it easier to accept. Callie believed. She had faith. I only knew that vampires had cost me everything. “You know what our problem is? We’ve been running a marathon and there’s no finish line. We need pie time.”

“Pie time?”

“Yeah, that’s what the farmers in the diner used to call it. Time to relax and eat a piece of pie. Things always look different after you’ve had a piece of pie.”

Callie sighed. “I wish you could have your old life back.”

“I can’t think like that anymore. Wishing for what will never exist doesn’t get the job done.”

There was a click as Callie turned off the light, and then she said, “Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for agreeing to stay. It means a lot.”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, it’s not. You could’ve left. I would have gone with you.”

I thought back to the weird sensation I’d had at the Rexfords’ house. It could have been my imagination, but it wouldn’t hurt for us to check it out. “Maybe it’s nothing, Callie, but after what happened in Marshalltown, I’m not taking any chances.”

There was a long silence broken only by the gentle sounds of our breathing. “Good night, Sam.”

I stared at the ceiling until my eyes finally adjusted to the dim light from the clock radio next to the bed. I thought about God, and vampires, and all that had happened since the night Silas had turned my world upside down. I thought about how I had been forced to kill my wife. Even worse, I had stabbed my little girl through the heart with a silver knife.

Those thoughts kept me awake as Callie gave in to exhaustion, her breathing slow and steady, and then I drifted off to a merciful sleep.

* * *

I dreamed of death and suffering, then I looked up to a velvet black sky. I stood in a field of hard dirt and the remains of papery dry corn stalks. The smell of smoke tickled at the back of my throat and every breath filled my lungs with fire.

There was scratching near my feet, but I was too afraid to look down. There were no landmarks, no way to orient myself, just a field that went on forever, row after endless row of silage stretching to the horizon.

“Hello?” I called out.

Again there came a scratch-scratching from below.

I cleared my throat. “Is there anybody there?”

The scratching intensified, becoming louder and closer, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look down. “What do you want?”

Pressure built behind my eyes and was soon the worst headache imaginable. A thought wormed its way into my head, full of malice.

I want you dead.

In the distance, a girl’s voice screamed for me to wake and then the dream ended and my eyes snapped open. There was an overwhelming smell of trees, and dirt, and dried leaves. But, beneath it all, there was the coppery stench of blood.

The hotel door room stood open and a towering figure loomed over me. I tried to stand, but the figure grabbed me by the neck and started choking the life from me.

Shit, shit, shit!

I struggled for air, trying to scream for Callie, but all that came out was a dry croak.

The thing held me in an iron grip, and I realized it was a
thing
and not a man, then it lifted me with inhuman strength and shook me like a rag doll.

The thing’s arms were thicker than a man’s but made up of hard rods. I grabbed them and squeezed, desperate to pry the thing’s fingers from my throat, but to no effect.

I kicked approximately where the thing’s crotch would be and my foot slammed into something hard and unyielding. The thing holding me didn’t notice, it just kept choking the life from me.

“Sam?” Callie asked sleepily.

I tried to call out to her, but I didn’t have any air left. Stars swam before my eyes, even though the room was dark, but Callie must have sensed something was wrong because she turned on the light, allowing me to finally get a good look at my attacker.

It stood almost seven feet tall and was made of sticks and branches arranged in a humanoid shape. There were eyeballs, honest-to-God eyeballs with wide rectangular pupils, in the abomination’s face. The thing glared at me and I could sense the hostility oozing from it.

“Sam?” Callie hissed. “What is that thing?”

The thing’s head swiveled to inspect her. The pressure let up for a moment and I took in a breath and choked out, “Run!”

The stick man’s head swiveled back to me and its eyes bored into mine. There was a palpable sense of hate coming from it.

It meant to kill me.

I’m not going down without a fight!

Fire rushed through my veins and I grabbed the thing’s fingers, long twigs bound together with mud and vines, and used my rage-fueled strength to snap off one of them. The finger wiggled and squirmed in my hand. I dropped it, and it hit the hotel room’s carpet and fell apart into a pile of dead wood and moldy earth.

The thing went crazy and redoubled its efforts to choke the life from me. It squeezed me with the force of a dozen men and I found myself desperate for air once again. My eyes felt like they were going to burst and there was an ocean of noise in my ears.

My vision was going black when Callie jumped on the thing’s back.

Its head swiveled around to stare at her and the pressure eased again, and then Callie screamed, “Its chest, Sam. Go for its chest!”

I released my grip on the thing’s arms and plunged my hands into its chest. If not for the change, I wouldn’t have made a dent, but with its help, my fingers burst through the twigs, bark, and mud until I felt something soft and squishy.

The thing went mad. Its head jerked around and slammed into my face.

It was like being smashed by a tree limb. Sharp, stinging pains erupted across my face with every blow.

The squishy thing between my fingers pulsed rhythmically. I squeezed as hard as I could, with all my enhanced strength, until I felt it burst.

The creature collapsed to the floor like someone had flipped a switch. I rubbed at my throat where it had choked me, and when I finally glanced down, there was nothing but a large pile of branches and tree limbs.

Callie was staring at my hands. I held them up and found them covered in crimson. Then I recognized the thing I had been squeezing was a heart.

I gasped and shook my hands, trying to fling the blood and remains of tissue from my fingers, then wiped them furiously at the soft cotton of my sweatpants.

“What
was
that thing?” Callie asked in a hushed tone.

I shook my head, staggered to the bathroom, and flipped on the light. My bruised and bloody face stared back at me in the mirror. There were scrapes and scratches on my face, and my eyes were tinged with red. I leaned closer to the mirror and realized several blood vessels in my eyeballs had burst.